Dailies and Monthlies: A Starter’s Guide

This is a short guide giving some pointers on ways to make the dailies and monthlies easier.

Dailies and monthlies are a relatively easy way to boost your income and get some extras like laurels and karma. However, some have complained that they make you deviate from normal play… that is not necessarily so, and this guide is meant to give ways to incorporate dailies and monthlies into your routine.

The following dailies and monthlies should be trivial regardless of how you play, or with just short detours: Daily Kills, Daily Gatherer, Daily Laurel Vendor, Daily Veteran Slayer. Daily Laurel Vendor requires one detour to visit a laurel vendor. Daily Veteran Slayer requires some searching sometimes, but do keep your eyes open to veterans that are not necessarily hostile like oakhearts.

Daily Kill Variety is more complex, and pretty much impossible in Orr. The best way to complete this is to play across areas using different characters (so as to save traveling costs). Even dungeons often don’t offer enough variety. Alternatively, early areas tend to offer more variety, especially if you’re willing to travel some distances.

Daily Aquatic Kills is pretty easy to complete, especially considering that you can kill ground-based creatures provided you are in the water when they die. I did a couple of hearts that way, attacking ground creatures from the water. It might not work all the time due to invulnerabilities if they can’t reach you, but most ground creatures near the water can either swim or shoot you.

Daily Dodger can be tricky once you understand the dodge mechanic: it only counts when you get hit while in the invulnerability phase of dodging. One way to trigger that reliably is to dodge towards your target as that target shoots at you. Also, dodging through red circles works pretty well. This can be frustrating however if you dodge away from shots or dodge out of red circles too fast.

Daily Healer is best done with escort quests, personal stories, or in NPC-heavy areas of middle- and late-game (i.e. where they die easily). You can apparently re-rez an NPC and get multiple credits, although there seems to be some cooldown on that. Probably best to alternate between two NPCs.

Daily Crafter is pretty trivial, though I would suggest you try to combine it with either levelling crafts, refining (often the product sells at roughly the same price as the components that were used to refine), or even cooking (because buffs are always useful).

Daily Events requires keeping an eye on the map to be able to run to events before they end. I personally find that this is the one that gets completed last, unless I am particularly lucky. Dungeons do award some events though, and WvW is another excellent place to get events. Also, crowded maps often has people calling out events, so keeping your eyes on the map chat can pay off.

When doing monthlies, it pays to keep an eye on synergies with dailies, and vice-versa. Some tasks are the same as dailies except for quantity, e.g.Monthly Event Participation, Monthly Completionist.

There are also many tasks that are specific to given months / world events, e.g.: In the Spirit of Giving?, Buster of the Busted, Karka Slayer, Candy Corn Consumption. Some tasks can provide quite a bit of progress on dailies, and as such are often better to do at the beginning of dailies rather than after its completion, e.g. Monthly Dungeon Participation, Fractal Frequenter, Monthly WvW Player Kills.

Then there are some odd ones.

There is some consensus that Monthly Salvage Kit Usages takes somewhat too long compared to other Monthlies. Just salvaging everything you get during normal play will progress this title at a slower rate than other titles. However, anything you do that rewards drops contribute to this, so you can keep playing normally and do your favorite activities. Alternatively, you can spend some cash and buy low-grade junk from the TP and salvage those.

Intrepid Explorer was a favorite of mine because it gave me a reason to do jumping puzzles that I had been delaying. Although it only required to get to the beginning of the puzzle… once there, why not do the whole thing?

Verdict

I think overall the dailies and monthlies are not optimal, but once you understand how they work, most of them become pleasant and fairly easy to integrate into your normal play.

I expect that once they make it optional to do all dailies, we might get the following changes: (1) Daily Laurel Vendor will probably be removed due to people having learned by then hopefully where these guys are, (2) we might see more specific dailies like a specific area or dungeon, which would be ok given that the daily could be done without it if you’re lacking the level or the area, and (3) the inclusion of more challenging dailies like survivor, again because the optional nature would make the daily feasible even without it. I would also like a daily WvW to get added to that roster of optionals.

I would like to see the Monthly Salvage Kit Usages getting nerfed, and more monthlies like Intrepid Explorer but for other types of achievements. And I especially want to see more dailies and monthlies specific to given areas.

One Opinion has been expressed on “Dailies and Monthlies: A Starter’s Guide”

Just wanted to mention the Daily Aquatic Kills is extremely easy in the beginning areas, because even whites count. There are usually a large number of whites in lower level waters. This also holds true for Daily # of Kills. Just use an AOE skill on a white insect swarm and rack up multiple kills.

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